I swear, I almost call in sick to work. I drive there in a daze, still feeling his mouth on mine. Just the way he caught my lower lip between his, before he broke the kiss. The way it didn’t seem like breaking at all.
It unmakes me—as does the taste of him still on my lips. I lick them and there he is, faintly salty and faintly sweet, and suddenly I can’t do a bit of work. I pause with a file in my hands, half forgetting whatever it was I was about to do. An e-mail I need to write to a supplier has seven mysterious typos I don’t remember making on reread, and when one of the nurses asks me a question I can hardly answer.
“Just use the purple ones,” I say, only it comes out back to front. I put ones in front of purple and have to hurriedly add that are in the middle, and oh God, oh God, I need help. Being lovesick is not supposed to actually exist outside movies. I said the words, true, but that doesn’t mean my brain has to die.
Why is my brain dying?
All I can think about is sex and him, and just when I think I’ve got it all under control—that taste on my lips washed away by disgusting tuna sandwiches and even grosser apple juice—I get a whiff of the shirt I ridiculously decided to wear. I turn too hurriedly, and the material shifts, and then there it is.
A great gust of Noah right in my face.
It takes just about everything I have not to smother myself in its folds. I make it all the way to the end of the workday and the safety of my car before I give in—and I’m proud of myself for that. I’m not so proud of how fast I drive it to get to him. Or how loud Cyndi Lauper is in my head as I do. By the time I get there I’m in a fever, electrified by songs I shouldn’t have thought of and hopes it’s crazy to have.
But the best part is: they’re not crazy to have at all.
He feels it too. He greets me at the door like I’ve been away for a thousand years, after the end of a government edict that banned sex forever. He practically lifts me off my feet—no, scratch that, there is no practically. He does, he just does, and I die to have it happen. At the very least, I have no qualms about wrapping my legs around him.
What qualms would I have when his hands are in my hair?
When his mouth is on mine, so hot and hungry I can hardly stand it?
“Why do you have to do anything but be here?” he asks between kisses that send me over the edge of some crazy precipice. “Earning money is so overrated.”
“I know. I’m giving it up tomorrow. We can dig a hole in a field and live there.”
“Sounds good to me. Let me just get my shovel.”
“Shovel later. Doing things first,” I say, and to my greatest delight, he agrees. He’s already pulling off my clothes. We barely make it up the stairs, just like in all my dreams of what sex and desire and wanting could possibly be. And it’s not because of me. It’s him—all him. Some dam has burst inside him, and now all the greed he previously suppressed is gushing out.
If he could cram me down his throat I think he would do it. He already has great handfuls of me. All he has to do is maneuver it all toward his mouth, and the thing is done. Hell, I want the thing to be done. The moment we get to the bed he starts this disturbing process, and it is awesome. I get his kisses on that sensitive spot just under my right ear, and once my top comes off he moves on to better places.
More thrilling, faintly shocking places.
Though I’m not really sure if they should be. After all, he’s licked my cunt. Pushing my bra to one side so he can fondle and suck my stiff nipples is supposed to be a breeze, in light of that fact.
It isn’t. It is the opposite of a breeze. I nearly arch my back clean off the bed—quite possibly because it just zings right to the center of my nervous system, but more likely because I didn’t even ask. I never said you feel great, keep going, carry on. He really does just go for it now, and in a far more assertive sort of way. The way he exposed my breast was almost rough. I feel the glancing edge of his teeth more than once, stinging sweet as something sour on my tongue.
And he wastes no time finding my clit with eager, feverish fingers.
By the time I get to touching him, I’m already halfway to my first orgasm. He’s fully dressed and I’m almost naked—though that isn’t exactly unusual for us. In fact, when I think about it, he nearly always keeps most of his clothes on. I put my hand almost up his T-shirt the other day and he kind of maneuvered me away, and he does the same here. He pulls back the moment I come close to edging my hand underneath his collar, and hides it beneath the guise of stripping my jeans down my legs.
After which it’s hard to remember what my point was.
And especially when he says things like:
“Tell me what you want.”
Because the thing is—we’re actually at the point where I’m comfortable saying. I don’t feel like I’m going to disturb him—or at least not too much—and nothing really seems out of bounds. He’s not going to dump me because I mentioned something too sexual. I can just say.
So I do. I grit my teeth and go for it.
“I want your cock in me.”
The thing is, I expect him to say no.
So I’m not too disappointed when he licks me, instead. Licking is good. Licking is great. He’s so good at it that sometimes I wake up from dreams half coming, just because they were full of his slippery tongue working and working over my clit. He gets everything so wet down there, and never just makes polite little circles. He rubs and sucks at my stiff little bud until I’m delirious. Until I’m saying things I’d never usually say, like fuck me with your fingers and Jesus, yeah, I’m going to come all over your face.
But that’s his effect on me. He wants me to talk like that, and encourages me to talk like that, so eventually I do talk like that. I tell him how wet he makes me—which, as it turns out, is the whole point into this little detour through pussy-licking land. Midway through he abruptly stops—right when I’m on the verge, flushed and filthy talking, clit so swollen I can make out its every little twitch and curve, cunt so soaking I can feel it sliding between the cheeks of my ass—and then he sits back.
And unbuttons his jeans.
Even better: he looks like he really wants to do it. His face is as red as mine feels, and his fingers tremble as he wrenches the material open. Plus there’s his mouth, all open and gleaming, and the way he speaks when he can finally manage it. “Keep talking,” he tells me as he shoves those jeans down, and suddenly it occurs to me what he got me all wet for.
That thick cock of his.
He wanted it to be easy.
He wanted me to take him without any trouble. Though if I’m honest, just watching him roll a condom on is enough to get me to that point. I shiver at the sight, and again when he pulls me closer—one-handed, on my hip, as strong as I can take it and as much as he can manage without panicking.
Though this is the part where he’s going to struggle, I think. And he does. For a start, he doesn’t seem to want to lie on me. He can’t cover me with his body. The second he goes to I see every single muscle in him seize up, and I’m fairly sure it’s only my filthy mouth that keeps him hard. “I’m so ready for you, so ready for your cock go on go on, fill me up,” I say—both because I am and because it has the desired effect.
His eyes practically roll back into his head when I do it, and I feel the thick tip brush over me. In fact, for a while that’s mostly what he does. He just strokes himself through my slick folds, occasionally nudging my stiff clit in a way that makes me jerk. Sometimes almost but not quite grazing my greedy hole, before moving away at the last moment.
I’m pretty sure it’s not his intention, but it’s the most agonizing tease in the history of the world. Several times, I almost die. By the time he seems to process that he’s going to have to try this a different way, I’m shuddering like a broken washing machine. A broken industrial washing machine that has been filled with rocks. Christ only knows what I’m saying—it sounds like unintelligible noises, intermingled with shameless begging. “Do me, fuck
me, anything you want,” I say.
And finally, he obeys.
He just needs another position to do it—a fact that I don’t quite get until he shifts around on the bed, exasperated, and suddenly it clicks. He wants me over him. I have to do this. I have to somehow get up on my shaking arms and legs and straddle him, even though I can barely move or think rationally. I almost knock him out with one flailing elbow. I definitely attempt it from the wrong angle at first.
And then there’s my body. God, my body, fuck, I must look like such a mess. My tits nearly smother him, and everything just feels fucking enormous—like I’m some monster trying to climb the Everest of him. It has to be the least sexy thing of all time and yet when I look at him, oh, Lord, when I look at him. . .
How is it that he looks like that?
His face is slack and stunned. I could drown in his eyes, as deep as they are and as lust-fucked. I swear, if his need for me to talk gets me going then that expression pushes me the rest of the way. It almost makes me come. I think I do come. At the very least, I’ve never taken a cock so easily in the entire history of my pathetically sex-starved life. I just glide right down on him, despite the fact that he has to be roughly the size of a Coke can. I should be wincing, I’m sure.
Instead, I moan all the way to the root of him.
Not even moaning, really—it’s this whimpering sound like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Certainly nothing I’ve ever done before. Not for someone’s cock. Not for the kind of sex I’ve had in the past. And even more staggering: that isn’t even the peak of this. It doesn’t end there. How could it, when his hands immediately go to my hips and his eyes go wider than I thought they could possibly go and then, oh, then he says the best possible thing he could ever possibly fucking say.
“Hold on, hold on, Jesus I think I’m going to come.”
I honestly never thought I’d be so happy to hear those words. A swell of actual sensation goes through me to hear it. My cunt clenches around him involuntarily—though of course, that just makes things worse. His head goes back for that. My Noah, my repressed, wound-so-tight Noah, pushes his head into the pillow, and after a second he tells me why.
“Oh man, I can feel you doing that. I can feel you getting off around me.”
At which point, I maybe lose my mind a little bit. I can’t fault myself for it though—he’s the one who sets the challenge. He’s the one who lets me know how much my excitement excites him. What else can I do but play to that? I’d be a fool not to take advantage just a little—just by doing it on purpose. Then that purposefulness gives way to frantic rocking and maybe a bit of back arching and possibly some feverish rubbing at my clit, until finally I end up almost completely out of control.
So much so that when he asks what he then does, I almost do it.
His cock just feels so good and I’m so close—not to mention how amazing it is to just do this. To see him enjoying it, actually enjoying it. Is it really a surprise that I want to go a little further? Push him a little harder? He’s grabbing at the sheets and bucking his hips, sounds so much like moans coming out of him. A bit more of this and he’ll come, I’m sure.
I’m more than sure. “Just like that—stay like that,” he tells me, which sounds almost exactly like what I would say if I was on the verge of orgasm. All I have to do is keep fucking him like this. He’s gonna do it, and then he says the thing and my hands move forward. I’m so used to wanting to help or please him that I try without thinking. His teeth are gritted. He’s clearly struggling.
Putting my hands on his throat doesn’t seem like a big deal.
But the second I do it I know I shouldn’t. I’m too far gone, and he’s too far gone, and he’s asking me for a terrible reason. “Just choke me a little,” he says, as though the little will make it less when even putting my hands there is too much. I don’t want him to have to feel pain in order to feel pleasure. I don’t want to hurt him so he can feel like I’m okay.
But that’s what it comes down to. Almost the moment I touch him like that—like the one dishing out the punishment instead of the one taking it—his head goes back. His hands find mine, pushing me to tighten them rather than take them away. I don’t even know if his gasp is one that comes from being throttled or one that means he’s coming.
Only I do know. I can tell.
It’s both. I can feel him coming in a way I’ve never felt any man do it—in great wrenching heaves that take over his whole body. He damn near grunts my name, and that odd pulse I can feel inside me. . .that’s his cock jerking and throbbing as he spurts.
Or is it just me? I think it might be me. Because I can’t for one second deny that when he does all this, I do it, too. Great waves of pleasure pour over me, so thick and good I can hardly keep breathing. My throat seems to seize up, and when I try to scream all that comes out is a thin hiss. No surprise though, really. My teeth are so gritted you’d probably need a crowbar to get them apart.
By the time it’s done, I’m crying.
Though I’ve no idea why. For the unbelievable glorious intensity of it? Or for him and what he needs just to get through it? He looks dazed in the aftermath, like I might have to remind him of his own name. His eyes are unfocused, and those hands still cover mine over his throat, and in one way I’m glad. At least he’s not ashamed, I think. At least he’s not full of horror or revulsion.
He even tells me that was amazing, and for a little while I believe it.
I’m grateful for his kisses. I feel warmed by his thanks.
“No one has ever done for me what you do for me,” he says as he holds me to him. And he’s right, that’s true, I do some pretty interesting things for him. But whether that’s good or not is completely debatable.
As I learn sometime later that night.
Chapter Nine
I WAKE TO the sound of thunder, and beneath it the whine of a dog. Trudy is at the bedroom door, and she doesn’t look happy. Her tail and ears are down, in a way I’ve never seen previously. Why would I have? She has nothing to be afraid of. Her life is all happiness, and especially thanks to Noah and his inability to do anything but spoil her rotten.
So when I see her cowering in the doorway, I sit up immediately. Goose bumps break out all over my arms, and not just because of the fear my dog is obviously feeling. The fear could be explained by the storm. Animals usually get scared over things like this.
But the problem is: she doesn’t come upstairs. She never comes upstairs.
Why has she now? Why is she just standing there like some ghostly sentinel? There’s something so creepy about it—though I struggle to think of the reason why. Because she seems so still and near silent, staring and staring at me through shadows as dark and thick as molasses? Because her eyes are so black and so grave?
Partly, I think.
But something else occurs, as I peel back the covers and reach for the shirt I abandoned somewhere in the middle of all that earlier bliss. It occurs so hard that I kind of hold in that position, eyes widening just ever so lightly.
This is what happens in horror movies, when the killer is in the house. The family dog tries to warn them. The thunder rolls in the distance. Spine-tingling music trickles through the place, while the heroine prepares to meet her doom, oblivious. And downstairs someone creeps around, searching for something to sink his knife into.
Maybe the creeper has already found that someone.
After all, Noah is mysteriously absent from the bed. His side has even had a chance to cool completely, to the point where I draw my hand back on feeling it. The ice there sort of stings. It settles in my heart.
What if Ted is somehow not in prison anymore? He might have escaped. He could have gotten an early release that no one remembered to tell me about. Things like that happen all the time in Lifetime movies, and even if they didn’t my mind would still conjure them all up. My mind is always conjuring them all up. It’s why I sometimes go back seventeen times to check the door is actually locked. It’s why
I have a cupboard stocked with Mace.
The police can protect me from Ted.
But nothing can protect me from my own imagination. That thing is so ripe it’s rotten, just ready to burst out all kinds of putrid horrors. And as though to prove it, something else occurs just as I get to the door. I put one hand on Trudy’s trembling back, and there it is.
What if the imaginary person downstairs isn’t Ted?
What if the imaginary person is the one who haunts Noah?
He tried to escape a few times before. I know he did, because in a weak moment I looked him up. I read to paragraph three in his Wikipedia entry, before my absolute disgust and horror got the better of me and I had to close my laptop. It was bad enough to unearth what he did. But to unearth it and know that Noah is poisoned by that stuff?
That was too much—and even more so now. He liked to turn the murdered girls into puppets. He made them watch the terrible things he did. What if I get down there and he’s hollowed out Noah’s eyes, in retribution for all the information Noah gave the FBI?
It sounds ludicrous, impossible, insane, and yet a sound breaks out of me at the thought. I go out into the hall thinking of Floyd Humphries slowly lumbering up the stairs to meet me, and my heart tries to eat itself. An enormous shadow makes me start and step back, and not even the knowledge of what it really is helps.
It’s just a machine of Noah’s. Part of a car engine attached to a pair of wings on stilts. The creepy angel I call it—much to his amusement. Only it’s not so amusing now. Now the fact that it could have been anything in the darkness is just one more layer of nightmare, and even when it turns out to be something else, I still fumble and stumble my way to the stairs.
Most of me wants to lie down before I get there. Just lie down and let the phantom Humphries bash my skull in, because quite frankly anything would be better than this. Anything would be better than fear like this, over the slightest thing. I thought I was getting strong again—I thought I was strong again.
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